Recently, along with the spread of personal computers to homes and the like, digital still cameras capable of inputting image information obtained by imaging a landscape, a person, or the like to a personal computer have been spreading rapidly. In addition, more and more cell phones and smartphones have built-in camera modules for inputting images. Such devices with image capturing capabilities employ image sensors such as CCDs, CMOSs, and the like. Recently, these types of image sensors have been downsized greatly and, consequently, image capturing devices as a whole and image capturing lenses to be mounted on such devices have also been required to have more compact sizes. At the same time, the pixel count of image sensors has been increasing, thereby causing a growing demand for improvement of image capturing lenses in resolution and performance.
As such image capturing lenses, those downsized by reducing the number of lenses, for example, to four or further to three are known. Further, as image capturing lenses used when a high resolving power is required, those with increased number of lenses, for example, those that use five lenses in order to improve the optical performance are known.
As image capturing lenses that use five lenses in order to improve the optical performance, those composed of a first lens having a negative refractive power, a second lens having a positive refractive power, a third lens having a negative refractive power, a fourth lens having a positive refractive power, and a fifth lens having a positive refractive power arranged in this order from the object side are known (refer to U.S. Pat. No. 7,480,105, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-008562, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,110,188).